Over zen en leven

Safely masturbating along the sidelines of other peoples’ sufferingRecently, I got a Facebook-message from someone, announcing a ‘Bearing Witness Retreat’.Maybe you don’t know what ‘Bearing Witness’ means. In that case: ignorance is bliss, don’t try to change it. You can still retreat :-). No one forces you to continue reading. After this blogpost it will be too late and you will be tossing and turning with the koan: are these the fruits of western Buddhism? I’m afraid yes.Bearing Witness means you look at suffering. But of course, you will then have to make sure there’s some really heavy duty suffering. Not the half-assed prosperity-suffering, like a leak tire or a traffic jam. That’s just everyday stuff. No, real suffering, you know, suppression, torture and genocide. They don’t settle for less, at Bearing Witness.Guess three times where they go this time. Lampedusa. The island where all Africans strand on their way to happiness in Europe. If they don’t dry out or drown on the way. There, the ‘Zen Peacemakers Society’ will hang around for a few days.Apart from that, hardly anything is clear about the retreat. As the self-proclaimed Peacemakers formulate it:‘This retreat is in its pioneering phase. This doesn’t mean we don’t have a program with meaningful ingredients, but that we ourselves don’t know exactly how things will work out.’Read: we have no effin' clue. And those meaningful ingredients, for whom exactly are they meaningful? For the Africans, or for the participants with their prosperity bellies and fat bank accounts, who have seen and done everything already, and are now finally looking for ‘inner development’?So, no clue what it will look like on Lampedusa. But the imagination of the organization is all the more lively. They want to:‘Read, sit in silence (guests will be invited: eye witnesses like Lampedusans, tourists, police / military person, etc.)’Police? A military person? They are Italians. I wish you good luck with the local carabinieri, if they don’t finish you off straight away because you come too close. Look forward to hearing how many natives or professionals they can lure into their stage play. Tourists fall for anything out of sheer boredom, so at least that won’t be a problem.Furthermore, also for the retreat-holidaymakers, the beach is a huge attraction – a whopping two activities take place at this magic threshold between land and sea. They will (maybe) ‘sleep outside on the beach for one or two nights (voluntary)’. On top of that, there will be a ‘night watch at a campfire on the beach’. Very convenient in case a boat full of exhausted Africans arrives during the night – at least they are lit. Maybe they could start swimming towards them already a bit. That would be cosy, arriving together!Which actually surprises me. If you really want to bear witness, why don’t you let yourself be ripped off by traffickers in Africa and embark on one of those overcrowded, extremely dangerous boats, with a risk bigger than life that you will arrive dead. That’s the difference between courage and cowardice. But I don’t read anything about that in the announcement. Probably, this part is deleted as a result of failing interest. A pity after all.But anyway. You could always still go to Rwanda, where they mess around in the genocide on the Tutsis. Paternalist neo-colonialism in a fake Buddhist guise.Or would you rather go to Auschwitz, the cream of the crop in terms of suffering, and nicely matured, a guaranteed full 100 points on your suffer-o-meter? Nowadays, participants pay at least 1600 dollars for a return ticket. Come and get it.In short, ‘Bearing Witness’ is upgraded disaster tourism and corpse-eating by the sons and daughters of western prosperity, who seek nourishment outside themselves for evoking inner emotional extremities, in order to feel alive again. Spiritual parasitism. They pay large sums of money for it. But it’s very healing, burning candles and acting compassion-like along the tracks of total dehumanization – suppression, torture and death. Why? If you cannot do it at home with your loved ones and enemies, why travel half the world to masturbate on other people’s suffering?